New Addition: Dictionary of Pseudonyms

Dictionnaire des pseudonymes (Dictionary of Pseudonyms). ed. Georges d'Heylli. Nouvelle édition. 1887. Dentu / Libraires de la Société des gens de lettres: Paris. Clothbound Sextodecimo, 559 pp.

 

Along with Champfleury and his friend and collaborator Jules Claretie, Georges d'Heylli was one of the most active historians of the avant-garde, and of 19th Century French literature generally, during the second half of the century. He was the editor of the long-running historiographic journal Gazette Anecdotique, of which the Revenant Archive holds 54 issues. His Dictionary of Pseudonyms is still regularly consulted in scholarly works today, and contains biographical and bibliographic information on many writers now nearly forgotten. His preface to the work compares the relatively banal use of pseudonyms as proper names in his own day (the 1860s, when the book first appeared) to its use by the previous Romanticist generation, who often employed them creatively, using shared heteronyms and ludic bibliographical jokes.